May 2009

30 May 2009

This is just a short post acknowledging good design. One of the most overlooked elements of design are error messages. Acknowledging problems just isn’t a very interesting part of software design. Consequently, messages tend to be cryptic and more annoying than the actual problem.

I just received the following error message in CoTweet. It says that there is a stability issue with twitter and they will notify me when service is restored. That is simple, well worded, helpful and includes reassurance that they’ll be watching out for me so I don’t have to keep checking.

28 May 2009

Business is lazy. If business doesn’t understand something, it quickly assigns it, outsources it or otherwise gets it off the to-do list. At the Twitter Conference #140TC in Mountain View this wee, Morgan Johnston talked about how important it was to have someone in the company with authority interacting on social media.

He had several stories about directly helping customers because Morgan had full penetration into the organization. To the extent that he held the door open on a plane for two extra minutes so a family running from one delayed flight (on another airline) to that flight could make it. The family had a member who was tweeting his pain while they ran.

Outsourcing your social media activities to an intern or a consultant means you stand a pretty good chance of working with someone who may well know how to use Twitter, but knows nothing about your business. Don’t get me wrong, I know some people who are free lance community managers, have more than one client and do a great job. But these people make it a priority to know their client’s business and ensure that they can quickly get to people capable of acting on a customer request.

If you must outsource your social media interaction, make sure that the person you are hiring cares, that you take the time to train them in whatever they need, and that you give them access to resources.

If you can’t do this, then don’t outsource. Do it in-house – which you probably should be doing anyway.

24 May 2009

We were tired and little shell shocked. It had been a trying day – leaving us very late for dinner in a sleepy resort town on a Sunday night. We finally found a place that was still open and sauntered in.

The musician in the corner was playing a song we both appreciated and that calmed us down. The waiter came to tell us the specials.

We stared. By the time he was done with the mile long and seemingly impossible ingredient list we looked back at the menu for something. It was incredible the number of things they thought they could cram into the dish. I’m not sure if it really existed, or if the chef just really hated that guy and wanted to give him something hard to remember.

In business we see this type of thing with impossible to decipher Microsoft licensing agreements, mortgage documents, and software packages with 20 million alleged features. There is a point where people just stop tuning in. Like us, they will buy what they can comprehend – or buy what they feel forced to.

Either way, the producer’s message isn’t getting across. It’s not being poorly communicated by marketing. It’s messaging may not be bad. It’s buried under the confusing weight of its own feature set.

07 May 2009

“I would have built it out of rice crispie squares if it were appropriate.”

At Gray Hill Solutions, we don’t subscribe to one coding platform. To do so would be to lose any advances in software tools – which come at a wonderfully bewildering pace. It makes sense, then, to not specialize in the tools – but in the application of tools in general.

Society has finally caught up with Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was on a life-long quest to make the world a better place. That’s a big ticket item. It’s difficult to make the world a better place through myopia.

In his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (read, buy), Fuller gave a long and impassioned argument about the dangers of over specialization. He leads this argument with this passage:

Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist. Operating under the patronage of the Duke of Milan he designed the fortified defenses and weaponry as well as the tools of peaceful production. Many other great military powers had their comprehensive design scientist-artist inventors; Michelangelo was one of them.

Many persons wonder why we do not have such men today. It is a mistake to think we cannot. What happened at the time of Leonardo and Galileo was that mathematics was so improved by the advent of the zero that not only was much more scientific shipbuilding made possible but also much more reliable navigation. Immediately thereafter truly large-scale venturing on the world’s oceans commenced, and the strong sword-leader patrons as admirals put their Leonardos to work, first in designing their new and more powerful world-girdling ships. Next they took their Leonardos to sea with them as their seagoing Merlins to invent ever more powerful tools and strategies on a world-around basis to implement their great campaigns to best all the other great pirates, thereby enabling them to become masters of the world and of all its people and wealth. The required and scientifically designed secrecy of the sea operations thus pulled a curtain that hid the Leonardos from public view, popular ken, and recorded history. – Bucky Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

The shifts from Leonardos to Pirates and so on were enabled by advances in knowledge. Merely introducing the number 0 into the human brain created a massive revolution not only in technology and travel, but in how we relate to the nature of work and to each other. Fuller here was saying that we can all be geniuses in our own way – we just have to pull back the curtain.

To Fuller, the geniuses were not overly specialized. They could not be. In order to truly be creative, you need materials from which to create. Frans Johannson calls this “the Medici Effect”. The Medici Effect is, in essence, a mashup of ideas that can only come by stepping outside your field of expertise and learning from something radically different. Fishermen have something to teach Internists. Astronauts have something to teach pawn shop owners. You never know, because the nature of insight is that it creatively links ideas that may not seem linkable.

So we are now in a world where we are understanding the world faster than ever before. Digital technology so vastly speeds up the conversation that innovation and invention are common place. “What have you invented for me lately?”

We are now all da Vincis.

In order to be da Vincis, we must now embrace Fuller-style generalism. No one is better to examine than Fuller himself for this. Being a generalist didn’t mean Fuller was mired in reading random books. Fuller built housing and cars. He was an author and and artist. He was practical and theoretical.

Or we can look at Henry J. Kaiser (right). Kaiser oversaw shipyards, steel mills, automotive plants, engineering firms and a massive health care company. Dude was hardly stuck in one mode of thinking.

The fact is that today advances in systemic thinking are requiring more holistic visions. The human body was at one time a collection of fairly autonomous parts that functioned together. Now, the body is understood more as a system and medicine is reacting to this realization. But it doesn’t stop there, because the body reacts to lead in your paint, to particulates in the air, to the sun’s rays, to recycled air, to motor vehicles, to stress … Suddenly being a doctor is even more complicated than before.

Recently when I was in Hospital for pneumonia, the doctors asked me a lot of questions. An not-insignificant number were about stress. Did I own my own company? Was business going well? How was my life at home? Had I suffered a loss recently?

At that point, at least at that hospital, I knew medicine had turned a corner and that we were starting to embrace Fuller’s wisdom at last. Our understanding of the world and life is becoming more systemic and holistic. The advances of technology and the speed of culture are now so fast that expertise is seen as temporal and contextual. What is our expertise today will be obsolete technologically very soon – but the experience of learning and applying the technology is what is really important. The actions are ethereal, the lessons learned are permanent.

Now it’s up to us to let people know those lessons learned and to grow from them. That’s the new expertise. We are all experts, we are all generalists.

05 May 2009

From the “while we were sleeping” desk, the Obama administration has been quietly making good on their promises for a more open and transparent government.

Part of this can be seen on the cover of Today’s NY Times. The press can now cover the return of war dead from the Iraqi and Afghani theatres. Prior to this, the press was prohibited from directly photographing the return of dead soldiers.

As we’ve seen, it’s the policy reversal that’s covered more than the caskets themselves. The actual daylighting of government actions, is the story here.

In the recent stimulus package, projects included needed to meet specific requirements for transparency. How the stimulus package was being spent was at the top of that agenda. It was merely philosophically important to the administration that this money be spent properly. It was actually codified into the package that if you received that money, you needed to make the public aware of how much you spent and how you spent it. And you needed to make that, and other information, available via RSS so that the public had a better chance of collecting and analyzing that information.

The White House has an official photostream which is creative commons licensed. What does this mean for bloggers and the general population? We now have a set of constantly updated photos of what’s happening in the White House to use when writing about what’s actually happening in the White House.

We also have an official glimpse into what goes on in the White House and with key cabinet members daily. Major news sources will still provide us with details, surely, but the stream is simultaneously a good will gesture, an inexpensive resource, and a catalyst for conversation.

There is certainly a long ways to go. Information sharing in more complicated (and more vital) areas will certainly take time. The FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse is taking some time to find its place in the post-transparency world. And that certainly isn’t the only area needing an overhaul.

But, to a very real extent, the entire labyrinthine world of the government needs this overhaul and that’s going to take more than a couple months of figuring out.